Grubby sex has just become a bit noisier

When I was a little girl, I used to beg my father, who managed the St Kilda cricket team, to let me go with him and see his lads play. But he wouldn't countenance it. As a 17-year-old interpreter at the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne, I soon found out why.

Girls who hung around sportsmen were understood to be asking for it. If they caught a competitor's eye, there was a good chance of wham! bam! but none whatever of a "thank you, ma'am".

If a sporting opportunity for sex of any kind arises, sportsmen will go for it, especially if their mates, who are also their rivals for places in the team, are looking on, daring them, chivvying them, winding them up.

If alcohol has been taken, disinhibition can be total. Acts of astonishing grossness enter the mythical record, fuelling hours of happy reminiscence.

One of the most important mechanisms for binding any company of men involves shared transgression and mutual guilt. No matter how revolting or destructive the behaviour, none of the men involved should ever breathe a word of it to an outsider; the penalty for doing so is the most painful of all: permanent exclusion from the group.

As long ago as 1970, the American baseballer Jim "Bulldog" Bouton caused utter consternation by publishing his diary for 1969, which included graphic descriptions of what baseballers did together when they weren't on the field. Ball Four described what would now seem rather mild transgressions: looking up women's dresses amid ribald commentary, and the occasional gang-bang with one of the groupies, called "Baseball Annies".

A favourite sport was "shooting beaver". This involved getting on the roof of the team hotel and peering into all the hotel windows in search of the sight of a woman undressed, on the toilet, in the shower, whatever, and then calling the whole team to assemble and enjoy the show. The best bit was when they would all cheer and the appalled woman would register that her innocent and private behaviour had been witnessed. The fun went out of it if she gave the impression that she was deliberately exhibiting herself. She had to be unknowing, like a deer in the sights.

Bouton's treachery was bitterly resented. He was released by the Houston Astros in 1970 and it was not until April 1977 that he was signed again.

What Bouton was describing was and is, and probably always will be, the morality of the locker room. This is why no sportsman would allow his daughter to hang around his teammates or act like the fans he has seen so often abused. The same rape fodder climbs through ventilators to get into the toilets, will perform any sexual service no matter how debasing, because it's the only contact with their idols they can get.

Good family men have been known to succumb to the groupies' onslaught, believing that as long as they don't kiss these desperate creatures, as long as they make no move that could be interpreted as a sign of affection, they haven't been genuinely unfaithful. Indeed, the more brutal the treatment of the women, the less they have to reproach themselves for. Pack rape in such circumstances can come to seem guiltless, a condign punishment for being a stupid slag even.

So there is nothing new about "roasting", the sharing out of eager women between sportsmen, nothing new about the women feeling humiliated and used, nothing new about the contempt and hostility that the sportsmen who are abusing complaisant women express.

Two elements do seem to have changed. There's no question that the women are stroppier. They're not embarrassed to say they agreed to sex with one man they'd only just met, or even with two, but they insist that they hadn't agreed to being brutalised, insulted or humiliated, and they want redress.

They might well be insisting on the right to free expression of their own desires, which include shagging the odd hyper-fit footballer, provided he doesn't abuse the privilege. But they also seem quite interested in another factor in sex with footballers - namely, indecent amounts of money.

The chances of a conviction for rape, in a case where footballers have had sex with a half-drunk woman, say, are virtually nil, but the chances for a significant pay-off from the club or the individual players are good.

The current system of accusation and withdrawal, complaint followed by dismissal of charges, failed attempts to injunct and so forth, fits the pattern. Most of the cases now on the books will fizzle.

This is not to say that the women who scream and holler haven't been abused, but that publicity is more effective than the law in obtaining redress, especially when there's as much money sloshing around as there is in football. The impression that rugby players are a different breed, who never behave like pigs or enjoy humiliating women, is in flat contradiction to the facts.

If you're passed on the road by a bus with a huge bare arse pressed against every window, chances are the arses belong to rugby players. And rugby songs are the filthiest of all. Rugby players don't end up in court or the tabloids for the simple reason that they haven't any money. The same holds for athletes, for swimmers, and even for cricketers.

Big-name sports stars are marked men; even if they use prostitutes, they run the risk of bringing their sport into disrepute if the prostitute decides to seize the opportunity to have her semi-clad body draped across a centrefold together with salacious details of whether the athlete in question was "well-endowed" or not.

All the more reason, you might think, for the athletes to behave with more discretion. This is, from some points of view, a tall order. All athletes live on a knife edge. All are only as good as their last performance. All are incessantly reminded there is only one way to go after reaching the top.

The footballers' situation is the most precarious of all. As the last in the pecking order, after club owners, directors and managers, players are denied adult status. They are "boys" to be bought and sold, transferred or dropped or left on the bench; as they are denied autonomy, we can't be surprised if they lack responsibility.

Their survival depends on luck and is as fragile as a hamstring. Much of the concerted misbehaviour that ends in catastrophe begins as an attempt to discharge accumulated tension, which is no excuse.

It is notable that most of the footballers who have been making the headlines are young and single. But not all. Some have been very much married, and to trophy wives. The grey tribe of journalists scratches its collective head and wonders how, with that gorgeous creature indoors, they could be found with their mates drunkenly tupping a stranger in some hotel room. So are cliches perpetuated.

Athletes don't get involved in sordid behaviour because they need sex, but because they need sordidness. They need to do something so disgusting that it enters the unwritten record book, causing amusement and amazement in equal parts for as long as the team shall live.

Until now, they could keep the lid on this can of worms; the victims kept shtoom, the newspapers were paralysed by the threat of libel suits and astronomical pay-outs. At worst, the club could buy silence. Now that the women are beefing and the papers are printing and wives are walking out, the players are more vulnerable than ever.